Maya and Softimage XSI both run on Linux very well...and they are "professional" modeling/animation/rendering software.

I'm down in Christchurch studying at Canterbury University - the universities claim to fame being the Hamilton Waterjet. Years ago people moved from 'big expensive UNIX machines' - I remember when I was at CIT they had a whole lab of SGI O2's loaded with the latest and greatest IRIX. They moved to x86 machines running NT. Now it seems that we've got 'back to UNIX" as I see lecturer's and students either with Mac laptops or laptops loaded with Linux.

The migration is starting; it starts at the top niche areas and works their way down - people aren't just fed up with Windows Vista, they're sick and tired of the hollow promises, rising memory demands and very little provided in return for the steep system requirements. What sits at the top? just how out of touch Microsoft is with the end users requirements.